[jrhnewark]

Originally Posted by Graham

The point is that students should get a grounding in *all* areas of knowledge. You might never use it in the future, but just because someone says they want to be a fireman or a doctor or whatver when they grow up doesn't mean that they won't ever need that information or change their minds and career path later on.

Oh, I totally agree. Everybody needs to know how to work out what their 'leccy bill will be, so it all comes in handy.

This is why there's a need for doing all three sciences at GCSE. The problem with some schools is that they opt to allow students to only do a third of each science, which means that their grounding is so grounded it's useless.

Monkeys may be able to do it, but monkeys don't have Mickey D's!!

True - but, we still waste all this time on citizenship and other related targets setting. If Personal Social and Health Education can't teach people that oranges and apples are healthy and greasy fries aren't, no amount of attempting to explain how the human metabolism works will!

Just another bloody politician...!

Again, true...

Originally Posted by Damien

I think its a good idea, The topics they are being introduced to are more relevant to this time and more useful. Who on earth needs to know about the periodic table in real life

I always wonder... schools teach history, geography and religious education. Yet, they don't teach current affairs.

Now, being the grammar school boy that I am, politics is all very funny to us all (well, some of us - I normally pretend I'm paying attention whilst I'm actually looking at some blonde's a*se, but I'm straying off here.. ). But I wonder, at the crappy ****-pot comprehensives that exist (linger like a dog's fart, in some cases; and I don't mean all comprehensives, I've been to a couple of very good ones), how many pupils know who or what the cabinet are? What the latest humanitarian disaster is? How the economy will shape up when they have parents' with no reasonable source of income in their old age?